Eric Gans's weekly column on culture, desire, and the originary hypothesis — published every week from 1996 to 2019. An essential running commentary on contemporary thought through the lens of Generative Anthropology.
18 of 855 posts
In a recent email exchange, Matthew Taylor suggests that GA’s lack of currency in today’s intellectual market may be less a sign of its intrinsic incompatibility with our victimary Weltgeist than...
In the previous Chronicle I pointed out some areas for improvement in Originary Thinking . This time, I would like to suggest an imaginary revision to a more recent book. Given that the subject...
The basis for the dialogue in this Chronicle is Chronicle 399 , where I developed the idea of “Islamovictimism.” We suggest the reader turn to that Chronicle before tackling this one. – AK &...
The postmodern notion of écriture dates from the beginnings of la nouvelle critique in Roland Barthes’ 1953 Le degré zéro de l’écriture . In this work (whose anti-leftist stance, like that of...
Rereading Durkheim’s Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (PUF, 1960 [1912]), I am struck more than previously by the narrowness of the barrier that separates Durkheim from the originary...
When I began working on my book on Carole Landis, I recall that Antoine Philippe felt that the project was incompatible with GA; he wondered if I was proposing Carole as the divinity of a new...
This Chronicle is a preliminary version of a paper to be delivered at a conference sponsored by Imitatio at Stanford in November. Readers are invited to comment either through the feedback function...
This reflection on the place of GA on the “intellectual scene” was inspired by the recent creation, after four consecutive annual summer conferences, of the first international GA organization, the...
An early step on the road to GA was taken in 1969-70, when Alain Cohen, a UCLA graduate who still teaches at UCSD, introduced me to The Pragmatics of Human Communication by Paul Watzlawick et al....
The text that follows is that of my talk at the fourth annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference held at Westminster College in Salt Lake City and Brigham Young University in Provo from June...
The recent Thinking the Human conference at Stanford, my paper for which was published as Chronicle 402 , gave me a new idea for positioning the originary hypothesis with respect to the sciences...
The recent controversy over Terry Jones, the Florida minister who intended to burn some copies of the Koran to commemorate 9/11, points up an aspect of victimary thinking that we tend to neglect, and...
The day after Christmas my wife and I drove to Pasadena to see the special exhibit of Ingres’ portrait of la comtesse d’Haussonville, on loan from the Frick Collection in New York to the Norton Simon...
As some readers know, I occasionally write poetry. Some poets like to say they write for themselves, others for their beloved, but we all know that the real destinataire of any writing is “the...
“MQB,” the Quai Branly ethnological museum in Paris completed in 2006, embodies a simple idea of modernity: the visitor is modern, the objects of his attention are not. The implementation of this...
When animals use indexical signals, a warning cry or conversely, a call indicating the presence of food or another desirable good, they communicate by contagion; the first emitter of the signal...
This is the text of a lecture delivered at the Thinking the Human conference, sponsored by the new Girardian association Imitatio, held at Stanford on November 15-16, 2010. My aim was to explain...
This elusive esthetic concept, which can be traced back to the pseudo-Longinus’ “Peri Hypsous” usually situated in the first century AD, often seems to partake of the prestige of its referents. The...